he's been in custody for more than a thousand days now bradley manning tells his story the army private pleads guilty to giving classified information to wiki leaks but denies helping the enemy a report from manning's day on the witness stand straight ahead. and as millions of americans are made out of work wall street is again living the good life in fact bonuses for wall street exacts are up eighty percent as the u.s. economy struggles r.t.l. looks inside the profits of big banks and wall street. and trying to keep your e-mail private dotcoms megaupload says they are going to offer encrypted emails will this work plus has apple lost its now to peel we'll talk tech buzz later in the show. it's thursday february twenty eighth four pm here in washington d.c.

i'm liz wall and you're watching our. we begin today with significant new developments in the case of bradley manning the young man accused of the biggest breach of classified documents in u.s. history pleaded guilty to ten of the twenty two charges against him he pleaded not guilty to aiding the enemy the most serious charge against him today the alleged whistleblower spoke on the stand and read aloud a thirty five page statement where he defended his actions he said in his testimony today quote i believe the public release of these cables would not damage to the u.s. however i did agree that the cables might be embarrassing for more on the new details are producer andrew blake was at the hearing today and joined us earlier from fort meade i asked him what these please me and for the case. well it all comes down to whether or not the government actually wants to accept his plea if the government says ok p.f.c. manning we will take your plea of guilty on ten different counts and not guilty on

the twelve others he could face a maximum sentence of twenty years behind bars now there's another chance that the government could accept a plea but at the same time decide to continue prosecuting him under the charge of aiding the enemy now if that's the case that is a charge that does does carry life in prison now the government could elect to actually execute manning be convicted of aiding the enemy but they already said that they would not do that so far from from what we heard today manning did it make guilt to everything for the first time ever actually for the first time after a thousand days actually stood before a court and said i did this then the other thing i did it all with weiqi leaks and they have all of the shame that i supplied to them so that the government could use that. time to actually sentence manning for his eventual court martial or it could say ok you know what we accept your plea we'll see you in twenty years but what's going to happen today is the judge is going to continue asking manning about the different charges from there she's not going to actually make a decision today but eventually we're going to see if this case will move to

a court martial or not so this could extend. for a while actually the court martial would begin in june in a schedule for around twelve weeks but might not make it after the government just accept this plea right and you know one another interesting thing that happened today manning took the stand and i understand it was a lengthy testimony thirty five pages he read tell us about his testimony today. yeah he actually went through pretty much every thing he was accused of doing he said look here's this collateral murder video this is how i uploaded it and this is why here are hundreds of thousands of state department and diplomatic cables uploaded them and this is why. manning wanted to pretty much explain his intent in releasing the information something that he wouldn't actually be able to do during the court martial so by submitting his plea he actually pleaded guilty to these things and explain why and a lot of it really had to do with him saying that he just became just pressed with

what he was seeing overseas the actions that he was seeing a wall that will deployed in iraq just made him uncomfortable and when he started investigating and started going through the state department cables and started looking up to the collateral murder video for example he said these are things that give a much more clear picture of what's actually happening in the world would benefit by knowing all right and i also heard that manning actually mentioned brought up the press pacifically the washington post the new york times and reuters what did he say about possibly taking it there before taking it to julian assange as wiki leaks. well you know it's no secret that the government is using this case to get close to wiki leaks that is incredibly obvious and throughout manning's testimony today and you know even right now in the courthouse in front of me colonel denise lind is quizzing him grilling him about his relationship with wiki leaks so when when manning first began and his testimony this morning or this afternoon what he

told them was you know he was familiar with wiki leaks but he didn't go to that organization first the first thing that he did when he had an tiriel that he wanted the were told to see was t. called up the washington post and talk to them for around five minutes on the phone and said look i have some things i think you would like to see manning said he believes they didn't take him seriously and you never heard back from them from there he called the new york times and he left a detailed message with multiple ways for them to contact him and that instance mannix that he was also not met with the response so of then eventually he figured wiki leaks was the best organization to go to when you said it's into makes sense so you might as well give it a try. uploading piece after piece of material over the course of believe a few months and has to point here is that during the pretrial motion hearings last month one of the government's prosecutors actually said that you know if manning had supplied these materials to the new york times the new york times would be charged with aiding the enemy so this is a really really dangerous precedent here you know had had the new york times answer

their phone or had the washington post actually took this young man really twenty one or twenty two at the time and they actually taken him seriously and followed up on what he told them they could have published material that would have closed down the two biggest publications in the entire western world so this is going to have a really really really major implications so actually knowing that you know we can weeks wasn't his first choice and the government don't seem too concerned with it right now though actually as we speak he's being asked about why when we keep leaks in particular what kind of relationship he had with julian assange other associates of wiki leaks and but on his part manning has said he does not know who we ever talked to at the organization that he came from milieu with their anti-secrecy. points and how the organization kind of just existed in a way that no one could wipe but their finger on it. was our to lead producer andrew blake. well former cia agent turned whistleblower john kerry heads to prison today carioca was the first government official to confirm the cia uses

waterboarding and other techniques as interrogation tactics and he was charged with leaking classified information to journalists and today he will check into the federal correctional institution and lorenzo pennsylvania to start his thirty month sentence r t was at his sendoff party we bring you that now along with his appearances at r.t. . in december two thousand and seven i seventy b.c. news that the cia was torturing prisoners and that torture was an official u.s. government policy that went all the way up to the president as time has passed and has as september eleventh has has you know has moved farther and farther back into history i think i've changed my mind and i think that waterboarding is probably something that we should be in the business of doing why do you say that now

because we're americans and we're better than that the next day the president said . and i still smile when i think about this the president said i don't know this man i don't know this man's motivation i don't know why this man would throw me under the bus but i did i threw the president under the bus here somebody who speaks out with courage tozer speaks the truth to power i admitted to confirming the name of a former colleague to a journalist who was looking for former cia officers to interview for a book. plain and simple and i mean they were going to get him on something. having lunch with the new york times reporter and talking about torture is not espionage it's just having lunch and talking about torture it was the government it was the justice department that tried to turn that lunch into something illegal and something ugly and it wasn't i have believed from the very first day that this was not a case about leaking this was

a case about torture waterboarding and sleep deprivation and cold cell with ice water being thrown on you or putting you into in a dog cage and keeping him there for days at a time not only did i not profit from this this broke me. and the surface knew there was no benefit to me in any conceivable way of blowing the whistle i only suffered from it the one thing that i wanted most of all was for my children to be proud of me and i know that morally i did the right thing and my children are proud of me and that's the most important thing if they think that this conviction is going to shut me up they don't know me at all i'm not seeing any indication that things are going to get better for whistleblowers or for activists i just hope that there's enough outrage out there once i go to prison that that helps someone in the future to stand up to the justice department did stand up to these infringements on our civil liberties i wear my conviction as a badge of honor but it's also important to say for the record that what you were

convicted of is because of your conviction in the truth. so to be convicted for the truth is the true badge of honor to the tendency i think is to feel alone when you're being prosecuted and the whole weight of the government is coming down on your shoulders going to make sure that. he knows you're going to get somebody who stands up for justice he has the strength and the courage to speak truth to power it's only that strength and courage that will allow him to persist and i commend you. you know in telling the truth we should care because of what it says about us a civilized people doesn't torture anybody period it's going to sound a little sappy but i'm feeling a lot of love at the moment i know in my heart that years from now people are going to look back and they're going to know that we were on the right side of history we were the ones who were right the government was wrong. well john kiriakou had to

prison many on the outside remain willing to fight on his behalf and will continue to tell those stories right here on our t.v. . well now to wall street where there is apparently a big comeback as the economy struggles to rebound from the recession two thousand and twelve turned out to be the second best year for bank profits this chart you see here really puts it into perspective you can see bank profits steadily increase until it hits a record high in two thousand and eight and that's when it all literally goes downhill in the economy plummets into a recession but you see in two thousand and twelve the banks are almost back to the record profits they had before the recession raking in one hundred and forty one billion dollars also at a record high wall street bonuses there reportedly expected to rise eight percent to twenty billion dollars well this is all wonderful for wall street but what about the rest of the country to discuss i'm joined now by peter schiff president of euro pacific capital hi peter so it's the second doing great things second best year for

the big banks great for wall street but is it a great sign for the economy as a whole. well you know it's good to be a banker especially if you have ben bernanke he asked the federal reserve the fed's policy is to try to revive the economy by inflating the markets that's great if you're a banker because you benefit on several fronts the markets are more vibrant so you can make more money speculating but also it's cheaper to borrow and that's a lot of the source of the speculation so the banks are doing really well under this environment but the u.s. economy is not doing well at all in fact people think that there is a recovery going on it's not the economy is actually getting sicker as a result of the current fed policy i mean it doesn't seem to add up the financial industry takes home. a third of all corporate what does this mean for the average citizen and how dangerous is it for the economy to be in the hands of the banks

essential well it's very dangerous that the government through monetary and fiscal policy is funneling such a large percentage of our resources into the financial sector and it's not just a financial sector look at government you know it pays to be in government look at the salaries of the bureaucrats in the lobbyists in washington d.c. so the bankers and the bureaucrats are thriving under this phony economy but average americans working on main street are not working because they can't get jobs because the resources necessary to employ them are in washington d.c. or in new york city it's not doing well and eventually of course this whole phony economy that the fed has created is going to come collapsing down and in the long run the bankers are going to lose money hopefully we don't have another round of bailouts but in the meantime they're getting rich as the economy suffers. getting rich by that we mean wall street bonuses to twenty billion dollars most recently at

a time that the economy is shrinking peter how does that add up. well it doesn't add up and i think wall street again is main street spain and people think the economy is expanding look at that we just got the g.d.p. numbers the revised fourth quarter and it showed a slight expansion one tenth of one percent but that's only because the government assumes that there is no inflation there they want us to believe that inflation is at about one and a half percent inflation in my opinion is at least five percent if not quite a bit more but even if inflation is only three percent that means the u.s. economy is contracting and which makes a lot of sense to me i mean the reason that it doesn't feel like a recovery for most people is because it's not it's still a recession but it's certainly good times in the banks or good times in washington d.c. because that's where our money is going if you're wondering why it's so hard to make ends meet on main street is because some bureaucrat is eating your lunch and this

is the king of main street in washington d.c. we reported yesterday massachusetts senator elizabeth warren she was grilling ben bernanke too big to fail pointing out that the big banks get eighty three billion dollars a year in taxpayer subsidies could the big banks even survive without the taxpayers propping them up. well many of them would have already failed so the answer is no but you know ben bernanke wasn't even being honest with sen warren of course he's not honest with anybody but on that particular issue he was disingenuous at best because when she is talking about that subsidy and it's hard to quantify exactly what it is but ben bernanke he acted as if the subsidy was there for the stockholders of the banks it's not the subsidy makes it easier for the banks to borrow money it makes it easier for the banks to attract depositors who want to put their money in an institution that's too big to fail and if you've got more money than the f.d.i.c maximums you want to make sure you're in

a bank that's going to get bailed out you don't want to take your chances on a smaller bank and so that does give the big banks an unfair advantage to attract customers and to borrow money and even if the banks fail the depositors are still going to get bailed out secured creditors are still going to get bells out and ben bernanke was oblivious to that he focused on the stockholders but that's not where the subsidy is most important is with attracting capital through lenders and through depositors' and it is an unfair advantage personally i keep a lot of my money in bank of america even though i believe that there are insolvent and if it wasn't for those too big to fail i would have a dive in my money there but now the problem is a much sounder smaller institution doesn't get my business and now when bank of america potentially fails the taxpayers are going to bail me out whereas if the government didn't have that guarantee i never would have put my money in harm's way in the first voice. certainly didn't get any clear answers from mr bernanke today

convincing answers but you know the argument that you do here is that shutting down these big banks would be disastrous to the economy and that these guys that have these banks are the only ones with the special knowledge to run them and that's why their bonuses are justified as is that all a fair argument. spoken like a banker of course. it's going to be bad for the people involved and yeah i mean in the short run we're going to have to swallow our medicine we're going to have to admit to a lot of serious problems that right now were papering under over but you know it's not like you know what's good for the wall street banks is good for america that's not the case actually what's good for those banks in the short run is actually quite bad for america because we're diverting resources that are badly needed in other parts of the economy and we're sending them to wall street what we need is more factories in this country now more banks we need to produce more we need to export more we need to save more and that are working really not about the. sorry

to interrupt you there asking what are they even producing they're getting a third of the profits but what are they actually producing what are they contributing to society want to ask you though is there any incentive to change the situation i mean people look back since the recession and and are wondering too big to fail still to be. a phrase that's going to stick around is there any incentive for this to change especially when. our all of that exactly. is the people in power the people who benefit from the status quo they have no incentive to change it and of course politicians don't want to rock the boat they don't want to do anything that might bring about any kind of short term pain even if it produces long term gains they're not good for the country they're in it to line their own pockets they want to make as much money for themselves they want to get reelected and if that means they have to sacrifice the country in the process well that's a sacrifice they're willing to make so i think the only thing that's going to change this is a crash a crisis which is going to come in the u.s.

currency and the u.s. bottom market we're only going to change when we have no alternative when the circumstances force us to change unfortunately by then the problems that have gotten so much bigger and the pain associated with correcting them is going to be so much greater. hopefully that's not what it takes to. the. president of euro pacific capital. now to the rise and fall of the big tech players first taking a look at apple not too long ago the company's scene was seen as untouchable and as a symbol of innovation but now apple's stock prices are falling and some aren't as impressed with the technology that it's been putting out and twitter on the other end has been pegged at to be valued at around ten billion dollars the wall street journal reports that twitter users increased forty percent in two thousand and twelve and when it comes to the cyber world of search engines and e-mail elite players could also be shaking up so we're going to discuss all of this tech stuff

now with adrian jeffries reporter at the verge. welcome adrianne so we recently doing well things that we recently learned that twitter has had an increase incredibly steve valuation ten billion dollars and this is from a company whose founder has admitted he's not really sure how to monetize it where do these estimates come from and our tech companies their values are are they still inflated even after you know recall back to the dot com burst of the early two thousand. right so twitter is getting a lot of attention and a lot of there's a lot of speculation about its valuation right now because they're preparing for an i.p.o. probably next year so there are a lot of investors who are trying to grab a piece of the company before it has its public offering and so that's why we're starting to see these estimates and some of these estimates that seem a little high and the short answer is that no twitter is not worth ten billion or nine billion is some of the estimates out there say right now the company still has the most optimistic estimates have them making

a billion dollars and twenty fourteen and so they're they're not close to justifying a ten billion dollars bill valuation today however that's speculation for what people think the company will be worth in the future and i think if you look at it that way it is possible to say that you could justify a value for twitter that was that high for anything one of the. as i mentioned earlier we saw how twitter the use of it is skyrocketing forty percent growth the end of two thousand and twelve there are so twitter how dry twitter user is how do you and i helped to make the company what it is and make it worth the billions that it's about it's predicted right so that's the thing about twitter first of all it's completely free for them to get all their content they have a huge volume of tweets going through every day we all do that for twitter you know without without them having to compensate us and they're able to sell ads against that and they're coming up with new creative ways to do that they just released

a video app that's it's getting very popular called vine and that opens up possibilities for new types of video advertisements and new ways for brands to use the platform. and the other thing about twitter's growth that i didn't see mentioned a lot of stories about it was that twitter still has a long way to go just in the u.s. only about fifteen percent of adults use twitter so there's still a lot of room for the company to get new users here in the u.s. which is a market that advertisers obviously covet and then there's room for them to grow across the world they're at about two hundred million users or. so the grass abilities for twitter are very it seems like everybody's on facebook from my little cousins to my grandmother not quite very next. want to shift gears a little bit now to apple because you know. it's the most valuable company in the world of course apple c.e.o. steve jobs is kind of renowned as this. innovator this legend. but now being had by tim cook. some people are saying that it's not really what is

symbolized anymore they're not satisfied with the products that are coming out they're not wowed by by what they've been putting out do you think maybe that apple's reached its pinnacle well i don't think it's so much that people aren't wowed by what apple's coming out i think they did they are seeing their stock price go down a little bit and it's kind of like they're almost a victim of their own success there you know like you mentioned most valuable company in the new york stock exchange surpassed exxon and it's now it's kind of like a well what have you done for me lately the investors are a little nervous with the new c.e.o. and they're waiting for the next i pad or the next i phone but i think customers are still pretty happy with what apple is doing the reviews for the i phone five were really good people love that phone the i pad is still unmatched in the tablet market and it's one of the most secretive companies in the tech industry so who knows what they could be working on next i don't think you can really write them off yet. google though has come under fire we've reported here for giving out users

information putting them raising these privacy issues and microsoft varying is pointing this out in their new ads wanted to play a clip of their ad campaign. you are in for a treat i just got a new payment third rate place on line a topic on google docs how do you know you didn't get screwed groove google cells of shopping results for a while they look like on a search results they're really paid at so you might not get the best price you don't even know which stores they've left out. i just got schooled. all right so there is very kind of poking fun of google docs being very cautious i guess with the user's data. and you know there are some other companies that are taking note that some consumers don't like this some consumers don't want their data being given out one such company is magda

they're trying to find out ways to make encrypt sharon and other forms of privacy so do you think that may be things like that could could take a share of the market market and kind of create this split of data will make is doing some interesting things but the short answer is no first of all the microsoft campaign against google is pretty disingenuous and it hasn't gotten much traction they put out an online petition in trying to get people to sign in say google should stop advertising should stop filtering through g.-mail and in order to place ads and they've gotten like an embarrassingly low number of signatures in most of those are are from people who don't quite understand what the campaign is about so i wouldn't give the microsoft scrupled campaign very much we other they do a valid point about google shopping results but that's not got to do with user data so mega is the new venture from kim dotcom has this kind of larger than life. net wizard who lives in new zealand now and he came out with this file share it's not

a search engine it's a file sharing. cloud host writer of this show you can get fifty fifty gigabytes of storage for free and then if you pay for you know some tears and i remember exactly with prices are but it's like ten or fifteen dollars a month and you can get different tiers different levels of data you can get a terabyte or whatever. and part of their pitch is that they keep everything secure and they keep everything private and everything that you do is encrypted and not even meg can see what's in your files and i think that so far. that doesn't seem to work for a writer works for any product yellow usually only is prefer free over private. but there we have seen that there are some people that hold privacy very dear to their hearts and will go for that we're going to leave it off there were at a time adrian appreciate you coming on though that was adrian jeffries our reporter

at the verge thanks. well it's no secret that money plays a role in politics and with record campaign spending in a post citizens united era some people say the influence is corrupting the system one music and business tycoon used the word gangsta in describing the government here as russell simmons a business magnate that founded the hip hop label def jam and clothing line phat farm he's also the c.e.o. and founder of rush communications here's what he told reuters there is a gangster about government not so bad what do you mean by that not is going through as a government in what respect the corruption that comes with the legal bribery in our system we know it's illegal bribery all the corporations that special interests have unlimited access to our politicians so much so that politicians represent them instead of people. the bombing of innocent people. yet the attack on other governments for their resources simmons was responding to critiques about the hip

hop culture and we're going to leave it off there but we'll be right back here in a half hour see that. there are twelve cities in the united states in which half of the people with hiv aids lives within a year of a diagnosis of. over sixty two percent of patients i diagnosed with aids this is a problem that frankly is substantially preventable it was like the big elephant in the room and nobody wanted to talk about they were really good public health campaigns that people were really focused on this problem you certainly should be able to have a lot less h i think a lot less human suffering. from our all of.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for life you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.